Time Management - How The Right Environment Makes It Easier
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When the topic of better “time management” comes up, many people’s eyes glaze over as they mentally prepared to be bored by a conversation full of dull techniques, forcing yourself to do things that aren’t natural for you and maybe things that just aren’t fun for us to do.
Those boring “brute force time management” techniques can work for a while, but if they’re not fun, easy or natural, like anything people eventually just stop doing them. I know I would rather learn ways to improve my time management which are easy and come naturally to me.
A very smart man named “Buckminster Fuller” is quoted as saying “Environment is stronger than will power”. I think he got it right. If you’re overweight and trying to avoid sugar, how hard do you think that would be if you have a box of candy sitting on your desk at the office? Now if instead, there was a plate of fresh cut vegetables there instead, you’d probably find it pretty easy to avoid sugar at that moment don’t you think?
Most people don’t even stop to think about their environment as they go about trying to improve their time management skills. I think the idea of creating an environment to support your productivity and time management success is something to consider. Try something here for a minute and see what you think.
From wherever you’re at, look at what you can see around your workspace. Pick a few simple items around the room and ask you’re the question “Do these items support my time management and productivity goals or do they steal my energy from reaching those goals?”
If the element you’re looking at doesn’t support your time management efforts, eliminate it from your environment right then and there.
For example, televisions are notorious for their ability to distract a person and also seduce them away from getting tasks accomplished promptly. If you have one in your workspace and can agree that it doesn’t support your better time management goals, simply unplug it or better yet, move it to a different room.
A messy desk full of papers can be another distraction from your productivity and efforts for better time management. Just ask yourself the simple question of whether having a messy desk supports your productivity or detracts from it. Beyond aesthetics, a messy desk makes it harder to find your important papers and can cost you more time as you have to hunt to find them. Help yourself out, clean up your desk!
I used these two mundane and simple because they are easy to understand and get the point across. The basic idea is to get rid of anything your work space that doesn’t help you reach your time management goals.
If we were to take this one step further, the next step would be to improve your environment by actually adding things which add to and make it easier for you to accomplish your time management efforts. We’ll share hints on how to do this in other articles.
